I think if they approach it the way Vatra attempted to with Downpour, it could very well work.

I wouldn't really want there to be too much freedom though as you would lose a lot of what most people like about the series, e.g. It often feels like (in the earlier ones esp) that the Town itself is ushering you in the direction it wants you to go and I wouldn't want to lose elements like this.

In short a certain amount of freedom is good but a Silent Hill/Fallout hybrid would struggle to capture the magic of the series.

Dead Island worked IMO, could it work for SH? I'm not convinced it would. could be wrong and I'm looking forward to going back to Silent Hill however it pans out.

Open world would very cool for this upcoming SH title. We are getting to the point in gaming where freedom should be an expected part of the experience. Anything less is subpar unless it is essential to the story/experience to limit a characters exploration. Open world is like everything else, in the right hands, when done right, it is awesome.

I think an open world could work, I liked what Downpour did & wish it had more side-questions. Perhaps they could even layer in some smaller stories, not just simple fetch quests but full fledged & fleshed out ideas.

Not really a fan of open world for this series. I appreciate what Vatra brought to the table in Downpour, but some of those sidequests had you travelling between two maps and travelling long distances to aquire items for certain quests.

It kinda made you lose focus of the main storyline and the side quests themselves had nothing to do with Murphy so he really had no incentive to solve them. A better fit would have to have had the stories run along the path of the main storyline and have them relate to Murphy in some fashion.

The way it was handled in Downpour seemed like Murph was going around solving mysteries for ghosts that were held in Limbo. Ultimately, i would rather much prefer a fully contained linear experience. In that scenario all of their energy is focused on implementing a solid and cohesive storyline.

I've seen this thread around for a while but never clicked on it, partly because I find it a little pointless to worry too much about what "could be." But I finally figured I'd come in and drop a comment.

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of it being entirely open world. I like there being some exploration and optional areas to check out- Silent Hill has always had that and it's always been nice. Having a little bit more of it would be perfectly fine. But I don't really want "open world" for a few reasons.I don't tend to play many RPG type games with their notoriously time-consuming open world kind of gameplay largely because I simply do not have that kind of time. And I certainly don't think Silent Hill needs to become that.

While I enjoy the ability to explore the environment some and to discover some things, maybe complete a few little optional quests (when they're not entirely pointless), I don't really want to just be thrown into a fake world and told "Here, have at it." I like there to be a point to it all, a focus, and some guidance. I like to maybe do a couple or few things along my way, but not for the experience to be as much based on openness and sidequests as it is on the main story/goal. When the sidequest kind of things become really numerous or time consuming in games, it becomes a bit ridiculous to me. Some of the sidequests in Downpour were great, but only some of them. I've completed all of them and I find it a better experience to play through the game skipping most of them, only doing a few that are scary/eerie in nature. Downpour also did not need as much exploration as it had. I've always felt like I wanted to check out every nook and cranny of SH games, and enjoyed doing so, but in Downpour it was downright tedious. Exploration in SH games should (in my opinion) be limited, and should most of the time lead to finding useful things, eerie/twisted things, or interesting things, which could perhaps flesh out the story a bit/add some interesting details.

I'd rather get more out of the time I spend on the game, and have better quality and more interestingness (I know it's not a word) to the areas we do explore, rather than a bunch of houses & rooms that are all alike, etc.

I couldn't completely damn it being open world until I saw what it was like in the game. But those are my concerns.

Its Gone Now wrote:

I wouldn't really want there to be too much freedom though as you would lose a lot of what most people like about the series, e.g. It often feels like (in the earlier ones esp) that the Town itself is ushering you in the direction it wants you to go and I wouldn't want to lose elements like this.

Yeah, that's exactly how I feel about open world games. I've never really enjoyed the lack of focus in them. I prefer "semi-open" world games, like Metroid or Castlevania SOTN, where there is a critical path to follow but some room to explore. The earlier Silent Hill games basically used that template, and it worked perfectly, allowing for a linear story but still enough room to feel like you were exploring the town.

I don't see any reason to deviate from that structure, it works too perfectly. I just don't think open world would work for Silent Hill.

I think that open world would be great for a SH game, but let's understand exactly what I would imagine open world to mean to me in a Silent Hill game.

You've just completed an eerie sequence which left you with a clue about the area you should go to next, and you're trying to find it but you're simultaneously uneasy and curious about the town. As your passing by you see something in the window, just some small interesting item, and so you go in to investigate. Then as you look into it you see a backstory on the town revealed that you never considered, and you learn about some event that transpired that only illuminates things enough to help you understand how deep the darkness really is. Does this event have something to do with my past? Where do I know this person from, wasn't that the person in the photo earlier? Maybe there's even a unique enemy pertaining to the unique backstory given in the store, maybe there's a puzzle, which has a strong weapon you might get to save and use sparingly (you'll save it for bosses if you're smart), or some healing items.

Either way, you would've gotten to where you're going whether you investigated the store or not. The backstory didn't even really explain anything, it just open a hundred more interesting questions. As long as an approach like that is taken to the open world idea, I'm absolutely game.